Telegraph Avenue

years ago, sent by the Texas grandmother along with news of Jamila’s death in a car crash. No other comment, no request for the check—in the amount of $375.00—that Archy had provided, uniquely, in return for the photo and the tragic news. He had kept his distance with the boy in the store today, but he was careful not to be cold or unfriendly. The embrace they had exchanged was perfunctory and all but imperceptible to Archy behind the turmoil of his emotions. Now the boy pedaled past, eyes forward, expression blank, looking at neither Archy nor Gwen, neither left nor right, wearing his T-shirt do-rag. He was, like Gibson Goode and the impending fat, stolid toddler in Gwen’s belly, going to ruin everything.

“Who’s that?” Gwen said, watching Archy intently as he watched the kid ride past. There must have been some kind of slackening of Archy’s jaw or widening of his eyes. “Archy, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” said Archy. At the last possible instant the kid folded. His eyes slid toward Archy, flicked at him before returning front. “I’m— Nothing. No.”

He watched the kid ride off, then turned to face the ruination of his wife, trying to think what he could do. “Wait here,” he said. He walked over to the El Camino in the driveway and opened its passenger door, then slid out the enormous pink aircraft carrier of the cake box from Neldam’s.

“What,” Gwen said, taking a deep shuddering breath, her face wary but brightening visibly, at least to Archy’s trained eye. “In God’s name. Is that.”

“Dream of Cream,” Archy said.

II. The Church of Vinyl

Can’t play a Hammond through no apology,” said Mr. Randall “Cochise” Jones. “ ’Less you got some new type a patch cord I don’t know about.”

Making it a joke, wanting to hide his irritation. Up all night, spinning five thoughts in his head: Gig tomorrow. Brown and gold plaid. Bird need his arthritis drops. Gas up the van. Get the Leslie. Gig, plaid, bird, van, Leslie; needle in a locked groove endlessly circling the spindle of his mind. Mr. Jones felt ashamed of that scanty midnight track list. When he was a younger man, his insomnia used to play it all. Sex, race, law, politics, Bach, Marx, Gurdjieff. All kinds of wild and lawless thinking, free-format, heavy, deep, and wide. Now, shit. Fit it all onto a pissant five-track EP going around and around.

“Said, be here Saturday,” Mr. Jones said.

“I know I did.”

“Black man my age, that could be asking a lot.”

“But here you are,” Archy said.

“Here I am.”

Here he was, sixty-six and still, in fact, lean and strong. The brown and gold plaid giving off that good casino- lobby smell of leisure suit fresh from the cleaners. Bird on his shoulder freely dosed with dandelion tablets mashed into a dish of Quaker grits. Van gassed up to the tune of fifty dollars, backed into the boy’s driveway. It was a white ’83 Econoline, odometer rolled over twice, napped with gray dust. Sitting there, rear doors open, empty as a promise. Boy had told him last week he was finished with the job.

“Mr. Jones, damn, I’m sorry, what else can I say?” Archy said. “It’s been a lot going on.”

“Told me it was finished.”

“Yeah, it pretty much was, but then, huh, turned out your treble driver went bad. I had to go all the way to this dude up in Suisun, pick up another one.”

Archy dialed the padlock on the garage door, unhooked the clasp. Stooped to grab hold of the door handle. Nine o’clock in the morning, boy in his pajamas. Slept in some kind of kung fu getup, satiny red with BRUCE LEE INSTITUTE stitched in white silk across the back.

“It really is almost done. Two, three hours, tops. Definitely for sure in time for the gig. When they expecting us?”

“You don’t know that, how you know you be ready in time?”

Archy shot a look at the bird, a roll of the eyes to say, Can you believe this man, waking me up at 8:57 in the goddamn morning to bust my balls with feats of logic? Archy Stallings to this day the only person besides Fernanda ever tried to engage the bird in conversation about Mr. Jones. Mr. Jones remembered the way Fernanda used to do it, how she would slam a bottle of pills down on the kitchen table, maybe, turn to the bird on its perch by the window, say something like You want to make sure he takes his medication, Fifty-Eight. Day he dies, I’m selling you to KFC.

“Nah, but seriously, Mr. Jones. I just need to put it back together, then you ready to go.”

“Young man,” Mr. Jones said, “I need to play it before the gig. See it works, how it sounds.”

The garage door swung upward on its hinges with a ringing of springs. The bird, a pound of warmth and steady respiration on Mr. Jones’s shoulder, greeted the Leslie speaker by reproducing the whir of its treble rotor when it powered up. But the Leslie, gutted, said nothing. Its cabinet was even emptier than the van, which at least had some furniture blankets piled into it, a tangle of rope and bungee cords, the dollies. All of the Leslie’s motors, wheels, drivers, rotating horns, and drum, its amplifier like a Kremlin of vacuum tubes, lay ranked in an orderly grid across the workbench at the back of the garage. Mr. Jones could see that everything had been cleaned and oiled and looked correct.

That gravitation toward correctness was something Mr. Jones had always liked about Archy Stallings. Even when Archy was a boy of five or six, kept his fingernails clean and square, never an escaped shirttail. Wrapped his schoolbooks in cut-up grocery bags. When he got older, fifteen, sixteen, boy started working those old-school hipster suits, the hat and a tie, styling himself somewhere between Malcolm and Mingus. Always reading some Penguin paperback, translated from the Latin, Greek; penguin the most correct of all birds, made even the fastidious Fifty-Eight look like a feather duster.

“I’ve been distracted,” Archy said. “And I dropped the ball. Between this thing with Dogpile, you know? And some other things…”

“You got to maintain focus,” Mr. Jones said, though the sound of his words made him wince. He recalled with perfect clarity the irrelevance of old men’s maxims to him when he was young. Rain against an umbrella, a young man all but sworn to the task of keeping dry. Archy was not so young anymore, and Mr. Jones had been raining down the pointless counsel on him for a good long time. No more able to restrain himself than a heavy-bellied cloud. “You made a commitment.”

“Oh, no doubt,” Archy said, shaking out his umbrella. “No doubt. Tell you what. You don’t have somewhere you need to be, I can put the whole thing together right now. That work for you? Take me, like, seriously, an hour. Then we can go over to your place, plug the Hammond into it, test out the whole rig. Thing needs adjustments, I make them right there. Then I help you load everything up into the van.” He straightened, tightened the string of his kung fu robe. “And you’re one. Ready for tonight. Okay? Sound like a plan?”

Using the placating tone he took with Mr. Jones, understanding like no one living, apart from one feathered savant, that Cochise Jones was in secret an angry man, prone to impatience, outrage, injury of the feelings. In the liner notes of Redbonin’, Leonard Feather called him “the unflappable Mr. Jones,” and at the time, in the chaotic midst of the seventies, that was the rap on Cochise, laid-back and taciturn like some movie Indian, Jeff Chandler in Broken Arrow. Nowadays people took him for this harmless, smiling, quiet old parrot-loving gentleman who, from time to time, at the keyboards of a Hammond, adopted the surprising identity of a soul-jazz Zorro, fingertips fencing with the drawbars and keys. Mr. Jones felt as trapped inside that nice old gentleman, smiling, chuckling, as he had inside the wooden-Indian cool of his youth.

“Day I need help moving that thing,” Mr. Jones said, “is the day I give it up for good.”

The Hammond B-3 was diesel-heavy, coffin-awkward, clock-fragile. To gig with one, a man needed to be strong-limbed or willing to impose on his friends. From the day in 1971 when he bought it off Rudy Van Gelder, Mr. Jones had always gone with the former course.

“Find me a chair, then,” he said. “And maybe someplace I can put this damn bird.”

Archy went into the house, came back with two mugs of black coffee, a computer chair, and a broomstick that he rigged with a C-clamp for Fifty-Eight to perch on. He spread one of the furniture blankets from the back of